Scientists were able to calculate the date of “Starry night” Van Gogh

Scientists came to the conclusion that the sky on the canvas of Vincent van Gogh “Starry Night” of 1889 in shape and detail corresponds to the predawn sky over Saint-Remy about July 22, 1889. In those hours, the waning moon in the form of a sickle, Venus and the star cluster Hyades in the constellation Taurus were close to each other. The study was conducted by the South Korean space company SLLAB and the School of Space Studies of Ken Hee University.

The astronomical side of Starry Night has been studied before. In the second half of the XX century, experts received conflicting results, and none of the works did not shake the religious and symbolic interpretations of the picture. Then for about 40 years the sky on the canvas was not disassembled in terms of observational geometry. Now scientists believe that for the observer, the cluster in the picture is the Hyads, and not the constellation of Aries, as previously thought. The team, which had been watching the sky for years and built many telescopes, found Aries an unlikely source of inspiration for the artist. The work began with two trips to France in 2019 and builds on Kim's popular science book, published in 2025.

The painting is usually dated from a letter from Van Gogh to his brother Theo, written around June 18, 1889. But the waning moon at that time does not explain the thin sickle on the canvas. But about July 22, the Hyads rose in the east near Venus, and the moon in shape was close to the painted. Comparing the original letters in French and Dutch, modern meteorological data and references to cicadas in the letters, the authors suggested that the circumstances of that summer were different from what is commonly believed.

To test the view from the artist's window, researchers in Arles matched the field of view in the 1888 Starry Night over the Rhone painting with photos taken at the scene. At Saint-Remy, they identified the point from which Van Gogh painted the landscape under Starry Night and reconstructed the view from there. The analysis of the shape according to the Procrustus method confirmed the correspondence of the five central stars in the picture and Hyades, and even more precisely the coincidence turned out to be in the drawing with a pen that Van Gogh made after the painting. This suggests that the sky on the canvas is based on real observations, not pure fantasy. By the same method, the authors assumed that the stars on the Cafe on the Terrace at Night of 1888 could represent the Summer Triangle.

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